Alexander Gordon Laing: First European to Reach Timbuktu

Alexander Laing was an extraordinary man, and this page explains what he became famous for, what he achieved in his not-quite thirty-two years of life, and what place he holds in the history of the geographical exploration of Africa.

Who was Alexander Gordon Laing?

Alexander Gordon Laing was a Scottish explorer and a major in the 2nd West India Regiment who became the first European to reach the fabled desert city of Timbuktu, arriving in 1826. He led two expeditions into the African interior, contributed important measurements to the geography of West Africa, and died on the return journey before he could publish his findings. His story is one of courage, obsession with discovery, and tragedy — a man who twice stood on the threshold of a great geographical breakthrough without quite crossing it.

Education and military service in the 2nd West India Regiment

Laing came from Scotland and carried with him the fierce personal pride that would mark his whole career. He served as a major in the 2nd West India Regiment, the posting recorded on the memorial plaque in Timbuktu. His military background gave him the discipline and physical hardiness that later allowed him to survive wounds that would have killed most travellers, and it placed him among the "strong men" for whom African exploration was, in the early nineteenth century, one of the few careers open to the daring.

Timbuktu — the city on the southern edge of the Sahara

Africa is a sun-scorched continent. The time is approaching midday. The sun stands almost directly overhead, and only against the very walls of the houses is there a narrow strip of shade, into which both people and animals instinctively creep. It is very quiet. Here, in this part of the city, there are no cars — they simply cannot pass along the narrow, oddly winding lanes. And in truth there are few vehicles in the town at all.

This is Timbuktu, an old city on the southern edge of the Sahara, about which legends circulated in Europe for centuries. A hundred years ago it was one of the most important trading centres of West Africa. The salt trade was the foundation of the inhabitants' prosperity, and the arrival of the azalai — the salt caravan — was perhaps the chief event in their monotonous existence.

The legends of the "capital of the desert" in Europe

A harsh city... It seems that only two colours surround you: the faded blue of the sky and the greyish-yellow of the sand. Sand covers the streets, sand fills the houses. And the houses themselves are the same colour as the sand. The desert advances on the city, and everything around is coated in a film of grey dust. For centuries this remoteness fed the European imagination, turning Timbuktu into a near-mythical "capital of the desert" whose gold and learning drew explorers to risk their lives crossing the Sahara to reach it.

The salt trade and the salt caravans (azalai)

The salt trade was the economic heart of old Timbuktu, and the periodic arrival of the azalai, the great caravans hauling slabs of desert salt, structured the rhythm of the city's life. Salt mined far to the north was carried across the Sahara and exchanged for the gold, ivory, and other goods of the Sudanic lands, making Timbuktu a hinge of trans-Saharan commerce. This wealth, more than anything, explains why the city loomed so large in the reports that filtered north to Europe.

Major Alexander Laing and the memorial plaque

Dust also covers the bronze plaque above the door of a house, on which the lines of English text can still be clearly read:

"To Major Alexander Gordon Laing, of the 2nd West India Regiment, the first European to reach Timbuktu (this form of the name is used in English literature) in 1825, who fell here in 1826. Erected in his honour and in his memory by the London African Society in 1930."

Little could be learned about this man from the various reference works. Laing was unlucky: on most maps of the African mainland the routes of his journeys are simply not shown, and even the specialised encyclopaedic reference "Africa" compresses his entire march to the city and his tragic death into a mere five lines.

Other travellers to Timbuktu: René Caillié and Heinrich Barth

Near Laing's house there are two more memorial plaques honouring the travellers who followed him to Timbuktu:

• one dedicated to the French traveller René Caillié,
• the other to the German scholar Heinrich Barth.

Both reached Timbuktu later than Laing — Caillié in 1828, Barth in 1853. But both returned to Europe and published their travel notes. Laing's own records perished with him, and today the history of his expedition can be reconstructed only from the few letters that reached their recipients and were later published. This is why Caillié and Barth are far better remembered, even though Laing arrived first.

Laing's first expedition

Twice in his short life Laing stood on the threshold of a great geographical discovery: the solution to the problem of the River Niger, a question that in those years preoccupied most of the world's geographers. Both times he failed to cross that threshold. He did not make the discovery, and yet he accomplished a feat. The single-mindedness and courage he showed appear extraordinary even when Laing is compared with his contemporaries engaged in the exploration of Africa — and in those days that was an undertaking fit only for strong men.

The problem of the River Niger and its significance for geography

The "problem of the Niger" was one of the great geographical questions of the early nineteenth century: no European yet knew where the great river of West Africa rose or where it emptied. Laing's first expedition took him closer to the sources of the Niger than any of his predecessors, and he was the first to attempt even an approximate fixing of their position. His measurements of altitudes in the upper reaches of the Niger became his most durable scientific legacy, because they demonstrated that the river could not flow into the Mediterranean Sea.

The second expedition and the road to Timbuktu

Laing's second expedition was the one that carried him across the Sahara toward Timbuktu itself, and it tested every reserve of his endurance. It is hard to imagine now how, after the attack in Wadi Ahnet, he managed to reach the residence of Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar — even by present-day medical standards his wounds would be considered extremely severe. Yet he not only reached it but did so with the firm intention of continuing his march and successfully completing an expedition that came to him with such difficulty.

Reaching Timbuktu in 1826

As later became known, the inscription on the memorial plaque is not entirely accurate. Laing was probably not the very first European to reach the "capital of the desert," he arrived not in 1825 but a year later, in 1826, and he was killed not in the city but on the return journey. What is not in doubt is that he did enter Timbuktu, lived there for a time in the house that now bears his plaque, and gathered materials of exceptional scientific value for that era.

Laing's tragic death on the return journey

Laing was murdered on the road out of Timbuktu, before he could bring his records back to Europe. In the early part of the last century people did not yet know how to combat tropical diseases, and every European who set out for the interior of Africa had to be prepared never to return home: tragic outcomes of African expeditions were, in those years, an almost ordinary matter. Laing's end was violent rather than illness-borne, but it belonged to the same pattern of danger that claimed so many of his fellow explorers.

The lost records and the surviving letters

Laing's travel materials never reached his contemporaries and were lost irretrievably to science — the very science to whose progress he was so proud to contribute. This was partly a consequence of his own character. He did not want anyone, even in the smallest degree, to make use of the fruits of his labours before he himself could; therefore he sent to Tripoli only the very beginning of the notes he had kept from the first day of the journey, and for the same reason he shared almost nothing of his observations even in letters to his closest friends. The remainder of his records perished with him.

The publication of Laing's letters in 1964

The few surviving letters of Laing were published in 1964, and only then did it become possible to appreciate him at his true worth. In these letters emerges the character of a strong and brave man, possessed by a thirst for discovery and ready to sacrifice for it everything dear and close to him. Because his own field notes were destroyed, this handful of letters is now the primary source through which the history of his expeditions can be told.

The dangers of early nineteenth-century African expeditions

African exploration in the first decades of the nineteenth century demanded a courage that went far beyond mere fearlessness in the face of danger. It was necessary to be always ready to fail, and then to begin everything again without hesitation and without complaint, relying only on one's own strength, because there was no help to be expected from anywhere. In short, one needed genuine human courage — and Laing possessed it in full measure.

Tropical diseases and the fatal outcomes of travel

Beyond the risk of violence, the greatest killer of European travellers was disease. Medicine had no reliable defence against the fevers of the tropics, and mortality among those who ventured inland was staggering. A traveller into the African interior had to reckon his return as uncertain from the outset, and the roll of explorers who died on their journeys was long. Laing survived wounds that would have finished most men, only to be killed on his way home — a fate that captures how thin the margin of survival was for anyone who chose this path.

The contribution of Laing's expeditions to geographical science

The chief scientific achievement of Alexander Laing will forever remain his establishing that the Niger could not flow into the Mediterranean Sea. He would later waver and abandon his conviction that the great river of West Africa emptied into the Bight of Benin, and this recantation would be prompted by petty motives scarcely worthy of a serious researcher. But no one could ever refute the results of his altitude measurements in the upper reaches of the Niger. That alone would be enough to secure Laing an honoured place in the history of science. He came closer to the sources of the Niger than any of his predecessors and was the first to try, at least approximately, to determine their location. The honour of discovering the source of the Rokelle also belongs to him.

Recognition and Laing's place in the history of African discovery

Laing's merits were not recognised at once in his homeland of England. The Paris Geographical Society did so far earlier, posthumously awarding Laing a gold medal in 1829. Even when confronted, as often happened, with the hostility of Africans, Laing understood that the root cause was the ruinous influence of nearly three centuries of European slave trading, and he never sought to blame it on some supposed innate traits of the African. This man had ample moral right to be indignant at the conduct of Park and his companions, who fired on the inhabitants of the coastal villages past which their boat sailed.

The character of a strong and courageous man

The first thing that comes to mind on becoming acquainted with the life of Laing is that one is dealing with a very brave and courageous man. Courage was something taken for granted by anyone who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, resolved to devote himself to the exploration of the African continent. But courage alone would have been far too little for such a man.

Alongside his courage, Laing possessed enormous stamina, matched by an equal physical endurance — the same reserves that let him drag himself, gravely wounded, to Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar's residence and still resolve to press on.

Yet it is impossible, however much one might wish it, to speak of Laing only in rapturous terms — this genuinely extraordinary man was too complex, and many of his qualities are apt to provoke rueful astonishment. His immoderate ambition, his unwillingness to let go of the materials he had gathered, his intolerance toward other researchers — toward Clapperton, for example — all belonged to him as surely as his bravery. It was precisely because of these traits that his travel materials, of exceptional scientific value for those years, never reached his contemporaries.

He was a son of his time and his society, in which individualism was the norm of behaviour and knowledge was already becoming a commodity, subject in some degree to the laws of the market. To these features, common to a capitalist society's shaping of human personality, Laing added only his own Scottish pride. And yet, by his convictions he belonged to the progressive strata of the British middle class of his day — one need only consider his attitude to the slave trade. The thirst for discovery, the thirst to know the new: are these not among the finest traits of the human character, shared by people of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contemporaries of the French Revolution?

Timeline of the life and travels of Alexander Laing

The following outline gathers the key milestones of Laing's life and expeditions into a single sequence:

• Early career — service as a major in the 2nd West India Regiment, the posting that opened the way to African exploration.
• First expedition — a journey toward the sources of the Niger and the Rokelle, producing altitude measurements that showed the Niger could not reach the Mediterranean.
• Second expedition — the crossing of the Sahara toward Timbuktu, during which he was gravely wounded in the attack in Wadi Ahnet yet reached the residence of Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar.
• 1826 — arrival in Timbuktu, the fabled city on the southern edge of the Sahara.
• 1826 — murder on the return journey; his field records lost with him.
• 1829 — the Paris Geographical Society posthumously awards him a gold medal.
• 1930 — the London African Society erects the memorial plaque in Timbuktu.
• 1964 — publication of his few surviving letters, restoring his reputation.

Science, in its development, has known far more failures than dazzling triumphs. But the people who met with failure have also earned respect and an honoured place in its history, because by their selfless labour — and often by their very lives — they paid for every step along the endless road of understanding the world around us. The extraordinary quality of Alexander Gordon Laing lies in the fact that he was one of these people.